Virginia AG fights state’s gay marriage ban

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring is going to court over marriage equality, not to defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage but to join two couples seeking to overturn it.

“As Attorney General, I cannot and will not defend laws that violate Virginians’ rights,” Herring said in announcing his decision.

“Too many times in our history, our citizens have had to lead the way on civil rights while their leaders stood against them,” he added. “This will not be another case.”

In an historic landmark 1966 case, brought by a Virginia couple, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a statute that forbade interracial marriage in the Old Dominion.

Virginia was in the 1950’s and 1960’s a leading legal defender of “separate but equal” education for white and African American students. The state mounted what it termed “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that required school integration.

Herring is an example of how a few votes can make a different. He was elected in November by a margin of 907 votes out of more than 2 million cast. He replaced an outspoken opponent of gay rights, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who sought unsuccessfully to enforce state anti-sodomy laws.

Herring acknowledged, in a National Public Radio interview, that as a state legislator he had voted against same-sex marriage in 2006.

“I had voted against marriage equality eight years ago back in 2006 even though at the time I was speaking out against discrimination, and I was wrong not applying it to marriage,” he said.

“It was very soon after that I learned that hurt a lot of people and it was very painful for a lot of people.”

The fate of state laws banning same-sex marriage is likely to end up back at the Supreme Court.

Federal judges in Utah and Oklahoma have ruled that state bans on same-sex marriage are discriminatory and violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

State court rulings in New Jersey and New Mexico cleared the way for same-sex marriages to proceed in the Garden State and the Land of Enchantment. The administration of Republican Gov. Chris Christie threw in the towel and decided not to appeal a lower court ruling to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court, last June, threw out a provision of the anti-gay federal Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples even in states where marriage equality is legal.

The high court also let stand lower federal court rulings that threw out California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that had rolled back same-sex marriage in America’s most populous state.

By joining the plaintiffs, Herring said Thursday, this time Virginia will be “on the right side of history.”